Abstract:

In this paper, we present the educational experience in the field of sustainable technological design gained in the last two academic years by the authors as lecturers of the teaching of Environmental Design course placed in the fifth year of the Master's degree course in Architecture of the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design of the University of Campania "Luigi Vanvitelli".

As part of the teaching, the discipline of Environmental Design aims to define the relationships between pre-existing and new environmental configurations to optimize technologies, construction processes, and use of materials to improve the quality of the environment and achieve human well-being. The environment in its complexity consisting of a set of architectural and functional relevance surrounded by and interrelated with its constituent elements, air, water, and soil, must be configured by technological interventions validated in a more general discourse of environmental compatibility. Therefore, if the objective of training, managed within the framework of such a course, becomes that of raising awareness and sharing of compatibility, the educational outcomes become, by the objective, multidisciplinary and closely related to an experimental interpretation of the environment. The objective of the study of environmental compatibility, moreover, specializes in several particular objectives, which essentially consist of the ability to detect aspects of the natural and man-made environment and to contain its transformations within the framework of sustainability. At the end of the teaching course, the student can interpret with graphic and descriptive expressions of immediate communication the existing environmental configurations and their compatible transformations. In this regard, a case study addressed in the teaching is illustrated concerning the transformation in a sustainable key of an urban open space that from a disused place, to improve the usability of open spaces, is transformed into a multifunctional green area, connected to the city through tree-lined pedestrian-cycling corridors to return a place to live. The redevelopment strategies adopted aim at the activation of revitalization processes and also to improve people's psycho-physical well-being by returning new green spaces and functions capable of safeguarding the natural resources present. Therefore, it is a circular approach that induces so-called adaptive reuse, i.e., sustainable urban regeneration through strategies that aim to reduce waste, CO2 emissions, and land consumption.

Keywords:

Environmental Design course, sustainable technological design, circular approach.